Log

The audition scene, occurring forty minutes into the 1976 cut, consists of two movements, each marked by a somber Bo Harwood song.

Cosmo Vitelli (Gazzara) and the cocktail waitress make preparations — music, costuming, makeup. Cosmo selects the music with care, settling on a piano ballad, and when he emerges from backstage and comes to a rest at the foot of a staircase, holding a pose as smoke coils up from his cigarette, it’s as if he has triggered a music cue for his own performance.

In the seconds that follow, the music combines with the lighting and decor and the gestures of Cosmo to form a certain mood.

“Accompaniment” doesn’t quite capture the sense in which these elements intermingle and, at least temporarily, balance one another — the ringing phone somewhere off in the background that goes unanswered, the lens flares, the color suffusion (reds passing into pinks and blues and violets and back again), the gently roaming camera, the way Cosmo carries himself, the vocal shaping of the lyrics.

Notice how the intoned phrase “alone I sit, for the moment…” is timed with an intense flare of light that contracts and dilates as Cosmo languidly moves through it, the piano momentarily silent. Then the clicks of his footsteps down into the main sitting area introduce the next stretch of music.

Meanwhile the film cuts (roughly on the word “desire,” rendered as four syllables) to shots of the waitress in the dressing room, applying makeup and trying on poses, getting into character.

It’s hard for us to know precisely what these two people desire, however. Are we watching a legitimate audition? A seduction attempt? Something of both (after all, doesn’t the one entail the other)? Is Cosmo looking for some action to take his mind off of his recently acquired $23,000 gambling debt? Here as elsewhere in the film, mood and atmosphere are primary and the dramatic causes and effects are resonantly uncertain.

When the waitress finally hits the stage, we’re shown a reaction shot of Cosmo: the camera follows his hand as it falls from his cheek to the table, where his fingers drum out an anxious beat.

In a long take, the camera, perched just behind and above Cosmo, watches the girl prance and jump from side to side, framing her mostly from the midriff down.

“No, you don’t have to jump anymore, sweetheart. Just walk up and down.”

The confusion here as to the desires and stakes of the scene is heightened by the play of onstage/offstage, a motif especially dear to Cassavetes’s work. Still in the same extended take, following the lyrics “and when the time is right,” the girl steps down from the stage and approaches Cosmo, her face now dropping into the frame. She raises both arms, letting her gauzy robe fall open, but at the top of her pose, her eyes suddenly shift to the space behind the camera, alerting both Cosmo and the viewer to the presence of someone else in the club, to an “outside” to this vaguely intimate interaction.

Cut to a shot of Rachel (Azizi Johari), Cosmo’s girlfriend and employee, the most popular of the club’s performers. Backlit by a flaring yellow spotlight, she appears confused by this scene as well. After sizing things up, she lunges at the girl and Cosmo tries to restrain her. The scuffle is presented as a flurry of barely legible, out-of-focus movements and a strange medley of rustling and crashing noises (Cassavetes and Harwood’s modest foley work).

The first Harwood tune ends and a second begins, this one a touch more melancholic.

Rachel now lies on her back, trying to catch her breath, not speaking, refusing the drink Cosmo puts to her lips.

What the scene offers, in its modulation of moods, is an ambiguous collision and overlap of roles public and private, of love and work. “I’m a club owner, for chrissakes,” Cosmo tries to explain to Rachel. “I deal in girls.” The interior of the club is no inert setting for this confusion. Its shifting fields of light and color depending on camera movement are implicated in Cassavetes’s mise en scène as as an active force, as a presence that imbues events in the strongest sense.

All this compels us to wonder just what goes on inside the Crazy Horse West, the place Cosmo, as proprietor and producer, is desperate to protect.

With each viewing of the film it appears more and more that Cassavetes injects the club’s garish atmosphere and ostensibly lame stage productions with a poetic significance requiring our diligent attention, our vigorous “imagination,” as Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts) repeatedly demands as if adapting the prologue of King Henry V, its famous apology for an “unworthy scaffold.”

On display, then, in the work of Cassavetes is not, as is sometimes assumed, a host of slapdash improvisations failing to pique our senses — “freedom” without much structure. As Kent Jones well observes, “Cassavetes’s cinema is acute on a second-by-second basis: To look away is to risk skipping the equivalent of a sentence, if not an entire paragraph (or stanza).”